Andy Warhol’s 1964 film featuring a continuous view of a sleeping man is titled Sleep.
Sleep lasts more than five hours and shows the poet John Giorno sleeping. Warhol filmed Giorno over several hours, then assembled and repeated sections of the footage to create an unusually prolonged portrait of stillness.
The film helped establish Warhol’s interest in duration, repetition, and ordinary activity. Rather than using a conventional plot, Sleep asks viewers to consider time, attention, and the physical presence of a recorded image.
Sleep is often mixed up with Empire, Warhol’s eight-hour view of the Empire State Building, or with Eat, which shows Robert Indiana eating a mushroom. Those films share Warhol’s experimental approach but have different subjects and structures. Sleep is specifically centered on Giorno asleep.